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Comment by Balgair | Hacker News Reader

Again, AI is not getting rid of degrees or learning or education.

It's getting rid of cheap methods.

Scantrons and bluebooks were always a way that made it cheap for institutions to produce results. Now those methods kinda seem silly, right?

500 person freshman lectures seem kinda absurd now, right?

Teaching via adjuncts that had 3 days notice for the class and are paid nothing is kinda scammy, right?

R1s professors whose tenure evals have nothing to do with teaching is kinda wrong, right?

The Oxbridge model of 5-10 person classes with a proctor is what the education with AI is going to be about. It's small, intimate, and expensive.

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Hurray! We’ve just made education only viable for the wealthy! Good job everyone, I can see this technology revolution is already living up to its promise of distributing wealth and power more evenly throughout society.

I just looked up some numbers for UCLA as an example. <45k students (undergrad and grad) and >5k faculty (and another 30k on staff)— so thats a pessimistic ratio of 1 to 9.

If you imagine students take 4 classes per semester and faculty teach 4 per semester… it seems stunningly feasible.

sama in 2023:

"We think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models"

sama in 2024:

"using technology to create abundance--intelligence, energy, longevity, whatever--will not solve all problems and will not magically make everyone happy. but it is an unequivocally great thing to do, and expands our option space. to me, it feels like a moral imperative."

sama in 2025:

...proposals requiring AI developers to vet their systems before rolling them out would be 'disastrous' for the industry.

Nothing to see here.

The silver lining is the Demographic Cliff of 2025:

https://www.npr.org/2025/01/08/nx-s1-5246200/demographic-cli...

PDF warning: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr73/nvsr73-02.pdf

Colleges will need to reduce class sizes, or close entirely, for the next decade at least. With smaller class sizes brings the opportunity for course instructors to provide more time per pupil so that things like in-person homework and project review is possible.

Back in the day if you were studying in Cambridge under somebody like Russell, it would have been a class of 5, and all of you were poised to become professors. Now, well, now it's a different story. Say what you will about higher education, but it's not for everyone. Most people currently attending university have no business being there, frankly, but what else are they supposed to do?! The game is rigged so. I wish we had something better, but we don't.

Maybe all this social stuff that AI would bring to focus—may prove a catalyser for radical change?

Unlikely, but one can dream!

to me this sounds like it means cheaper education. smaller classes could also be achieved more easily.

when we've just made personalized education viable for everybody. schools already have the computers, laptops, tablets and study spaces. only thing left is to put these AI education apps on them. classes could also just remain the same size. students will get personalized education through the app. students can still interact with the teacher when necessary or for class wide sessions with the teacher.

If the value of human labor is going to zero, which some say ai will induce, wouldn't the oxbridge model become the most cost effective option?

> If the value of human labor is going to zero, which some say ai will induce

These "some" are founders of AI companies and investors who put a lot of money into such companies. Of course, the statements that these people "excrete" serve an agenda ...

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